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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Memories
Forget
Thought
Things
Never
Nodding
Soon

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Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.
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Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
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I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.
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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
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Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.
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California: The west coast of Iowa.
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I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.
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[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.
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any compulsion tries to justify itself.
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I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.
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Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
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Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
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The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
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When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.
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